Whip It Movie Review

Featuring Ellen Page in her first post-Juno role (Smart People was filmed before her career-making turn as the eponymous pregnant teen), Whip It tells the story of Bliss Cavendar, a bored Texas teen on the beauty pageant circuit who discovers roller derby and kick-starts her life. What is it about eight wheels and some kneepads that brings out the inner bodaciousness in even the most meek girl? It's unclear, but it sure is fun to watch.

For the uninitiated, the current incarnation of roller derby (a term that dates back to 1922) comes out of a revival of the sport, a restart that got rolling in Austin, Texas in 2000. The mostly female athletes strap on skates and whiz around tracks (some flat, some banked) in competitions called bouts. Teams score points when their appointed "jammer" successfully laps and then passes a member of the opposite team.  Roller derby is a full-contact sport and all manner of shenanigans are employed to keep the jammers from passing skaters. While Whip It amps things up a bit for the cameras, bruises and bloody noses are par for the course. (Think of it as championship wrestling ... for women ... on wheels.)

Also par for the course is the campy theater of roller derby. Protective gear is worn along with fishnet stockings, bloomers, pigtails, ribbons, pleated skirts, and whatever else strikes the whimsy of the skaters. The culture of roller derby is steeped in third-wave feminism and a punk rock-do-it-yourself ethos, and the skaters adopt alter egos individually and as a team that are sardonically menacing.

At the rink, Bliss becomes Babe Ruthless and skates alongside Smashley Simpson (Barrymore), Maggie Mayhem (Kristen Wiig), Rosa Sparks (Eve), and Bloody Holly (Zoë Bell) on a team called the Hurl Scouts. Andrew Wilson (big brother to Luke and Owen) plays Razor, their hapless coach. Their big rivals are the Holy Rollers, a team lead by the delightfully nasty Iron Maven (Juliette Lewis).  

Bliss realizes that her mother, a former beauty queen trying to guide her daughter to similar

 glory, would not approve of roller derby. She enlists the help of her best friend Pash (Alia Shawkat), to drive her to her first bout.  And when she joins the team, she goes to great lengths to keep her parents from finding out about her new passion and her team from finding out that she's only 17 (21 is the minimum age requirement for skaters). Throw in a budding romance with Oliver, a local rocker and derby fan, and Bliss has a lot of balls to juggle.

Whip It, based on the novel Derby Girl by Shauna Cross, isn't a particularly inventive movie. You've seen this kind of teenage empowerment drama before. But Barrymore hits her marks with energy and confidence, making it easy for viewers to shrug off sequences that verge on cliché. More importantly, she has Marcia Gay Harden as Bliss's mom, Brooke. Page is likeable as Bliss, a good girl who loves her mom and wants to please her but is also trying to figure out how to make her own way in the world. But the movie is all-but-stolen by the remarkable Harden as a working woman who has learned the hard way how to make her own way in the world--and hopes to help her daughter avoid some of her own disappointments. In a small scene that might portend a particularly bright future for Barrymore as a director, we learn everything we need to know about Brooke in simple scenes that offhandedly juxtapose her life as a pageant mother (and former beauty queen herself) and a mail carrier. 

Whip It pits two different visions of femininity against each other--and while beauty pageants are easy targets for the derision with their absurdly superficial rituals, it's hard to say that roller derby is less absurd. Hardly. Instead, the tension here is between a system that values conformity and one that celebrates individuality. It's the tension that is at the core of the transition from childhood to adulthood--moving from an identity that is largely chosen for you by your family to one that you choose for yourself.

Bliss's family is a rounded out by her affable father Earl (Daniel Stern) and a little sister played by Harden's real-life daughter. This is a good family, and the movie never asks you to forget it. There are no villains here. Even Juliette Lewis's Iron Maven is a sympathetic soul underneath all the taunting. In a way she presents a challenge to Babe Ruthless--roller derby might be fun and good, but, just like one's reign as a beauty queen, it doesn't last forever. Who will you be when this comes to an end? Some might argue that the genteel world of beauty pageants is the better ground for answering this question, for developing into a woman of character, than the black-and-blue world of roller derby. The derby culture is certainly brash and sexually aggressive (cf. fishnet stockings), but a pageant's swimsuit contest is rather sexually aggressive too, no?

Whip It manages to challenge conventions without dismissing those conventions or the family in which they developed. And that seems to me to be the big triumph of this recast of the familiar coming-of-age trope. Bliss and her mom are two women who are figuring out how to make their way in the world. And they are lucky to have each other.